Memoir

A History

By Ben Yagoda

(Riverhead Books 291 pages; $25.95)

We are living in the age of the memoir. Consider the following list, one of many in Ben Yagoda's new book on the form: "Alternadad: The True Story of One Family's Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America," "Dadditude: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad," "Dinner With Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table," "Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life."

Those are just the dad memoirs, and that's just the past few years. There is nothing easier to poke fun at than people vain enough to write books about themselves.

Yagoda, historian and humorist, takes ably to this literary high ground. Rather than indulge the newest genre to afflict our shores, the memoir of the failed book deal - see "Out of Sheer Rage," Geoff Dyer's nonbiography of D.H. Lawrence - Yagoda insists upon a more rigorous treatment: not "Memoir: A Memoir" but "Memoir: A History."

The result is a multitude of often surprising facts. It's no secret that St. Augustine published the first example of the form, nor that Rousseau perfected it for the modern age, but did you know that P.T. Barnum wrote one of the best-selling memoirs of the 19th century? A book Barnum, characteristically, continually rewrote and later placed in the public domain - free for anyone to publish, or change.

The success of Barnum's book should give some idea of the distance between contemporary concern for the authenticity of memoir - Exhibit A: James Frey - and the concerns of memoir readers past. Yagoda repeatedly points out that there was no such thing as the "nonfiction section" until the 20th century. Herman Melville's tales of South Sea adventure sat comfortably beside the journals of Captain Cook, with readers left to determine what was true and what not.

Making my way through Yagoda's centuries of similar examples, the greatest revelation was not that our culture has grown uniquely addicted to "fraudulent" memoirs, as Frank Rich among others suggested at the height of the Frey controversy, but rather that we are uniquely obsessed with the facts.

Oprah Winfrey made it clear when she dressed down Frey's editor: "I think the publisher has a responsibility ... to categorize this book whether as fiction or autobiographical or memoir."

For all its value as a repository of self-penned lives, Yagoda's history in many ways partakes of the same contemporary obsession with labels. He goes to some length to show that the contemporary meaning of "memoir," the word, changed drastically in the late 20th century.

Until then, "memoirs," plural, were reserved for statesmen and other dignified figures; "memoir," singular, was used for a reminiscence of other people, often more famous than oneself; while "autobiography" was the form with the freedom, where the author was "not at all obliged to be exact about the facts."

Yagoda identifies the break in meaning quite precisely. He points to "This Boy's Life" (1989), the third book by the great short story writer Tobias Wolff, who added those two now requisite words, "A Memoir," to his subtitle for the first time in English literary history.

But was this really so striking a change? It's not as if other fiction writers hadn't penned closely observed books about their childhoods - think of Vladimir Nabokov or Mary McCarthy. They just didn't call the resulting books memoirs.

Yagoda does little to suggest why Wolff's change in labeling should be considered so momentous, and, in many ways, the failure to look deeper is characteristic of his book as a whole, which, like the hilarious series of dad memoirs mentioned above, itself often reads like a list - the great danger of any history, one thing after another.